Lets talk about the delicious creation that is fruit salsa. Fruity, a little bit tart, with cinnamon & sugar chips to dip? It’s the best. I especially love it because I have some very fond memories from the first time I ate it. Specifically, my friend Katie made it for the baby shower that she planned with my mother in-law before Olive was born. Coming from a food-loving family, I don’t know how it is that I had never seen such a thing before. Nevertheless, I vividly remember trying it and thinking that I could not believe that it was possible for my life to have such a void as it apparently did in the years before experiencing fruit salsa. Many thanks to Katie! :)

At the time, I didn’t know if Olive was a boy or a girl and I most definitely did not know that our bundle of joy would become my life’s greatest challenge (see Mothering Mini Me). Ignorance is bliss, however, so in my state of blissful ignorance, I had a lovely afternoon with my friends and Central Pennsylvania family celebrating our impending arrival with delicious food and absolutely no games that required candy bars to be placed in diapers and identified.

In the years since, I’ve had fruit salsa several times and the traditional combo of fruit seems to be apples and an assortment of berries, sometimes with kiwi, and then served with cinnamon and sugar tortilla or pita chips. If you make it that way, as Katie did, it will be fantastic. In fact, if I had a bowl of it in front of me right now, I would sit here and keep eating it for the next two hours…..or until it was completely gone. If I ran out of chips, I would have no hesitation grabbing a spoon and shoveling it in as fast as my hand could return to the bowl. This time around, I found papaya at the grocery store and the bees in my head started buzzing, so I made a tropical fruit variation. And because my other friend, Miranda, recommended it, I used wontons instead of tortillas and it was all so very yummy.

It would be impossible to tell you about this soup without first discussing my recent parenting Fail. That’s fail with a capital “F.” We all have times when we don’t exactly shine in the parenting department and recently I had my turn to be in the shade. These days being a parent is already competitive enough without exposing our failures to each other, but I’ll share mine because nothing makes you feel better about your own parenting fiascos than hearing about someone else’s, right? Consider it my gift to you!

When my alarm went off early one morning to go to Zumba class, I found 4 text messages from Olive indicating that she didn’t feel well and was in the bathroom. For starters, I never heard any of the messages come in, so it wasn’t until an hour later that I found her there, curled up in a tiny ball and asleep on the bath mat. She said she never got sick, so I helped her back to bed, and she went back to sleep. A few hours later, she said she felt better and was ready to go into school. I could tell that something about her was a bit off, but she insisted that she wanted to go, so to school we went! And, as luck would have it, she was at school less than 20 minutes before she got sick, a spectacle which thankfully left her classmates unscathed but I am told covered a desk and a half. She was mortified and I felt terrible. The lesson to be learned here friends is that if your kid is white as a sheet, but says they feel fine, no good will come from listening to them.